Michael Patcher: Xbox Game Pass Won’t Be Able To Replicate The Success Of Netflix

Microsoft recently announced its Xbox Games pass service for Xbox One that lets gamers play over hundred Xbox One game each month for a monthly subscription fee. Microsoft is certainly trying to introduce a Netflix type gaming service but industry analysts are not convinced that Xbox Game Pass would be as successful.

According to Michael Patcher, gaming research analyst for Wedbush Securities, Microsoft will not be able to replicate the success of Netflix through its Xbox Game Pass service.

This isn’t the beginning of Netflix-style programs, Gamefly was the beginning of Netflix-style programs.

Gamefly was exactly what Netflix was in 2006, DVD’s by mail. The price was a lot higher, twenty bucks and I don’t know their numbers today, but the last published thing I saw they had not got to 1 million customers paying twenty bucks a month.

It’s a hard model to make work, and Gamefly had every game. The point is they had new games and even they can’t get a lot of traction at $20 a month.

He further explained that so far Xbox Game Pass offers no titles that are newly released and this is not a good thing for the service.

Game Pass, is $10 a month, we don’t know a whole lot about it because it just got announced, but I looked at the titles that are listed as available and I see nothing that came out more recently than a year ago.

I saw Halo there, but Halo was a fall 2015 launch, and that was the most recent game I saw and then I saw a bunch of old games.

So I think and I may be wrong, that the game publishers are reluctant to put anything out there on Game Pass that they believe they can still sell to you.

What do you think? Will Xbox Game pass a success for Microsoft? Let us know in the comments.